A Watershed Moment in Public Alerting
A real-time web map goes a long way to prevent sickness when force majeure strikes. Last winter, a torrential storm caused two water pump outages in Atlanta, Georgia, risking contamination and necessitating a boil water advisory be issued to affected residents. To widen its outreach, the Atlanta Department of Watershed Management (DWM) used social media and the local news to promote a mapping Web site that showed the areas affected by the outages. Smart Notification If it’s not live, an...
The Climate Response—Government Leaders Take Action, Evaluate Vulnerabilities Due to Climate Change
By Nathalie Beauvais, Robert Brandon and Indrani Ghosh Across the country, government and industry leaders are taking a close look at the potential effects of climate change. What happens to people, buildings and infrastructure when extreme heat extends from a few days to a few weeks? When the one-in-100-year storm of today becomes the one-in-25-year storm of tomorrow? When sea levels rise above safe boundaries? The answers to these questions and many others are neither quick nor easy...
Don’t Lose Your LID—Learn These Lessons for Effective Stormwater Drainage
The concept of stormwater management under Low-Impact Development (LID) is fairly simple: it’s based on how nature handles rainfall in an undisturbed environment of meadows and woods. Nature works with simple concepts such as rainfall interception by the branches of a tree, which slows the velocity of a falling raindrop, which then lands on a soft bed of decaying organic matter on top of the soil. The organic layer further allows the rain to filter in and around the matter and then infiltrate in...
Tower of Power: Strong Steel Overcomes Constraints at a Tight Site
In Chicago, one of the world’s architectural capitals, it’s not uncommon to see unusual buildings, innovative designs and creative construction techniques. The winds are strong, the soil is poor, and there are a lot of regulations and coordination required to build. Overcoming the technical challenges associated with the unique design and construction of today’s highrises frequently is lauded by industry and the general public, as the buildings shed their boxy shapes and reach ever higher t...
Washington State Department of Transportation Uses 3D Immersive Visualization
The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) Visual Engineering Resource Group (VERG) uses Bentley’s 3D immersive visualization software, LumenRT, to create images, videos, and real-time presentations for use in such diverse applications as design reviews, courtroom legal support, and cultural resource documentation. VERG has gained national recognition for producing visual communications that explain complicated stories to a mass audience in a compelling and engaging way. Solutio...
Reality Modeling for Everyone
Highly Accurate Context from Simple Photography Before beginning any infrastructure project, a project team needs to survey existing conditions in order to provide the foundational input to the decision-making process—to understand the context within which the asset will be designed, built, and operated. The technologies and processes available to capture and visualize real world conditions have evolved beyond levels and tape measures to technologies such as Total Stations, aerial and gro...
Augmenting Drone Videos could Facilitate Construction Monitoring
Augmented reality is a fascinating technology that could change the way we live and interact with the world that surrounds us. Unfortunately, we don’t see many good applications of AR in engineering yet, partly because achieving good visual integration of digital objects with reality is very challenging. To display the augmented elements at the right location on a tablet display at every instant, the AR app must know the position of your tablet in real time - that is fundamental to AR. Now th...
HDR Delivers Texas’ First Modern Streetcar System
The Union Station to Oak Cliff Dallas Streetcar TIGER Project is Texas’ first modern streetcar system. The project is a collaborative endeavor between the City of Dallas, North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) and the U.S. Federal Transit Authority (FTA). The 1.6 mile line received a USD 26 million Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant, separating itself from the other 17,000 TIGER grant applicants, due to its econo...
Creating Real-time Navigable 3D Infrastructure Models
Designing successful infrastructure projects is one thing. Communicating and demonstrating those designs to clients and other stakeholders before construction is another. Bringing a design to life for people without a civil engineering background is always a challenge, whether your goal is to sell the design or communicate its impact. Over the decades, civil engineers have used everything from elaborate hand drawings to carefully constructed physical models for this purpose. Then, in the 1990...
Rethinking Rail Signal Design
Global consulting engineering firm Hatch Mott MacDonald had used a conventional CAD-based system to design rail signal systems when serving its public and private clients around the world. However, this approach had serious limitations in an industry where building information modeling (BIM), the processes and standards that define it, are becoming a critical success factor. Traditional methods mean designs have no added intelligence or connections to related documents including bills of mate...
Video: Crashes Drop Measurably After Rural Road Safety Improvement Project on US 521 in Lancaster County
AdventHealth Weaverville Hospital
June Issue 2026
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